Olympic Provisions to Publish Cookbook

The salami kings of Portland are teaming up with cookbook star Meredith Erickson for an as-yet-unnamed cookbook, due fall 2015.

Chorizo. Finocchiona. Soppressata. These are things best left to highly trained pork specialists and hung in old-school Italian delis. Or so we thought.

Eat Beat has learned that rising cookbook talent Meredith Erickson and the Olympic Provisions crew are teaming up for a book deal with 10 Speed Press.

Erickson, whose oeuvre includes The Art of Living According to Joe Beef and, most recently, Le Pigeon: Cooking at the Dirty Bird is joined by photographer Eric Wolfinger (Tartine, Prune, Flour + Water) for a fall 2015 release.

The 300-page cookbook will feature 80 recipes from both Olympic Provisions restaurants, take readers on gastronomic misadventures around Oregon, from hunting to fly-fishing, and chronicle master salumist Elias Cairo’s formative years as an apprentice under Switzerland’s culinary elite.

Erickson and the Olympic team plan to revisit Switzerland, traveling from village to village and collecting some of the region’s greatest cured-meat secrets, or, as Cairo describes it: “Have lunch on a glacier, drink tons of Grüner Veltliner, eat crazy braised wild animals, and visit 400-year-old meat shops.”

As for the charcuterie chapter, Cairo tells us it’ll be structured like a curriculum in advanced meat making, starting with the simplest preparations (rillettes and confits), and ending with dry cured sausages. “I want this to be a course in making charcuterie delicious and safe,” says Cairo. “Besides, you can’t ferment salami until you’ve stuffed a shit ton of sausage.”